Serious Sam: The Random Encounter was potentially novel when it was first released and very likely a highlight as part of the marketing push behind Serious Sam 3. However, under a modern lens and as a standalone experience, it falls a little flat.

Presentation wise, it delivers. The pixel art is all rather nice with some lovely chunky sprites and expressive animations. The audio is pretty good for the most part in both sound and music, (though I had a couple of issues where the music would just stop looping during combat). There are some fun little cutscenes and dialogue moments to setup both the game and encounters. It all feels rather polished.

But then there's the design, which is a mostly frustrating affair. The core of the game consists of a couple of basic JRPG combat tropes lightly mixed with bullet-hell elements. That's a cool idea, but these bullet-hell moments don't exactly allow you to dodge bullets once you've unlocked your full party. Once all three members are unlocked, I found it to be mostly pointless to include player movement at all. There was the odd instance where an enemy was already wide of hitting me, and I chose not to move into their path to make a shot. Not exactly satisfying. It's all stick and no carrot.

The item system's usefulness is also poorly signposted, and I feel specific item use is the only way you can finish the game. The difficulty has been tuned so tough that there's no room for error throughout a play through. This feels like it needed more testing time and a significant pass on the tuning.

The juxtaposition of such strong visual design against such sloppy game design is wild.

All in all, too random.